With an amazing cover and fantastic design work by Rachel, I know people are going to love it, even without reading the wonderful poetry inside! I’ve read this book three times now, so I know the poems in it are good.

I really do hope you’ll purchase a copy – all the money raised goes to St John’s Ward at Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital in Dublin. It’s a children’s cancer ward, and it could do with our help to ensure the continued service the hospital gives to its young patients.

Please visit this page and place your purchase – available for €7.50 plus P&P, and in e-book format, for €4.

Thanking you on behalf of all the staff, patients and families of St John’s and Crumlin hospital, and all the people who made this book possible,
Paul.

Great news! The book is now available for pre-order! To get the book sooner than you would if you were waiting for Lulu.com to print and post it to you, we’ll be taking orders to get the books in bulk, and then posting them ourselves to you (unless you know us in “real life”).

Visit this page to pre-order the book: http://paulcarrollwriter.blogspot.com/ (apologies for having to link to my own blog – couldn’t get the PayPal button to post on WordPress.com) – the button is on the top of the sidebar on the right-hand side of the page.

Make sure to include your postal address! We’ll email you to confirm your order.

Note: The price of the book is €7.50, with a €1.50 charge for shipping. When sales are processed through Lulu.com, shipping costs will increase for buyers.

It seems appropriate, now, to start a mailing list. The Facebook group has built up a little bit of attention and people are actually asking to make a mention of their own projects on it. I call that progress!

I’ve decided, therefore, to let all these people get in touch with other well-doers, and I’m starting a mailing list. To be included, send an email to poetry.against.cancer@gmail.com to that affect, and you’ll begin receiving updates on fundraising projects. If you’re fundraising, get in touch!

Also, when the work on the book is done, there will be a pre-order option available. Pre-order window will work in periods of three days at a time until the release of the book. No date is set as yet for the release (because I don’t want to put Rachel under pressure), but that will change the moment the files are uploaded to Lulu.com. At that point, we’ll be preparing for a launch of some sort, so copies will need to be ordered ahead of the publication day. People will also get to order then, through me, so that they can get the book mailed to them without the additional waiting time of the print. More info about this will be made available in the near future (signing up to the mailing list is the quickest way to find out about it).

With a few decisions to be made on the running order of the poems, I’ve realised that we should be building momentum on this project by now. So, I went straight onto Facebook and asked people to help us reach a target 500 followers by the end of the week. Simple, right? Surprisingly, yes. In the last few minutes alone we’ve gotten a dozen or so followers. If everyone suggests the page to their friends, we’ll be flying along on target. Then we just need people to buy the book!

Thankfully the writers are more or less up there on the networking chart. Most of them are online and doing quite well for themselves, while the ones that aren’t are quite good at establishing connections in real life. As for me.. well, I’ll be hoping to get the book, without an ISBN, into bookshops in Dublin. As soon as I get a chance, I’ll be out and about, going to Indie bookstores that I’m familiar with. There are three in the city centre that I know of, then I’ll be bothering work about it.

Please do your part! Spread the word about the book and the Facebook page, talk to bookshops about getting it in when it’s released, tell your family, your friends, anything you can think of to build the momentum of this project. The closer we get to our release date the more people we’ll need in the know of what’s going on.

I’ll be blogging a lot more about this in the near future on my personal blog, and on my writers’ group’s blog, and in our forum and on Twitter and all that sort of stuff. If you can help, get in touch. Any articles or blogs you write, let me know. I want to read them all.

Well, I’m finally closing the submission gates after people just vanished at Christmas. The good news, though, is that all the authors have been chosen and work has begun into putting them into the book. Rachel is even discussing the design of the book with me, so we’re getting somewhere. With the weather against us, we’re all stuck indoors, which might actually be a good thing! Rachel now only has to leave when neccessary (like at her new job!).

As for Sophie and I? Well, we’d like you to join us in raising awareness of the book before release. Over the next few weeks, Twitter will hopefully be going mad with people hearing about the book for the first time and wanting to buy it. If you’re reading this I urge you to spread the word, be it through Twitter, a blog, a video log if you want, word of mouth and any other method you can think of. Every little bit helps. And of course, when the book comes out, please buy it.

I really can’t stress enough how much this all means to me. It’s not just a huge project that Sophie and I undertook (and received lots of help with from Rachel and a few others). And it’s not just a poetry book. It’s a piece of hope that we can give to children who may be somewhat lacking in it. It’s a possibility that children will get better, or at the very least get the best care available to them. Cancer has done too much to too many people already, and it’s time the ordinary men and women of the world got to do something about it. The poets in the book are all ordinary people (okay, so a couple of them are quite extraordinary, but they’re not ‘real world’ celebrities, multi-published bestsellers or even, as far as I know, saving space in their own local bookshops.)

Help make dreams come true; spread the message and buy the book.

(And I promise to keep costs down – the Big Bad Recession still looks over our shoulders with its ugly head)

I’ve just been asked about the Terms and Conditions for submission; I’ll make it clear – we’re not out to steal your work, only to use your submissions to raise the most amount of money for St John’s. So the T&Cs are:

We retain exclusive printing rights to the poems chosen for one year after publication (open to negotation if the poet comes forth with a case, with due notice given, of course)

The poems will be published only in Poetry Against Cancer and no further volumes, unless permission is given from the author to do so – all authors will be given this option and are not obliged to accept second publication of the poem

We, the organisers, will make no monetary gain from submissions – all profits will go to St John’s Ward at Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital, Crumlin, Dublin (Their oncology ward)

If authors have any further queries regarding the T&Cs, please get in touch at the usual email address: poetry.against.cancer(at)gmail(dot)com.

Authors must have all the rights to their poems prior to submission; the same rights will be returned following a year after the publication date (unless, as it is stated, specific circumstances call for republication in another form).

Note that poems will be available in print form only through Poetry Against Cancer. We ask authors not to spread their submissions freely following submission so that St John’s may benefit the most from it.

Ignore what the submission guidelines say about the deadline, for now. There is still time to submit to the book. In fact, submit double. We need poems. Lots of poems. Because right now we haven’t received enough. It’s a shame, considering the cause for the book. Tell your friends, tell your family, tell your students, your classmates, your teammates, everyone!

You can submit anonymously if you wish, and we will respect that. We might know your name (you know, from the email account telling us…) but we promise not to spread it on if you request to be published as anonymous.